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Extended Article Pauline E. Hopkins's Intertextual Aesthetics in Contending Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. 13-66. EXTENDED ARTICLE PAULINE E. HOPKINS‘S INTERTEXTUAL AESTHETICS IN CONTENDING FORCES1 CARMEN MANUEL Universidad de Valencia [email protected] Received 1 June 2017 Accepted 7 December 2017 KEYWORDS Hopkins; Contending Forces; intertextuality; palimpsest; plagiarism; literary borrowing; Anglo-American literature PALABRAS CLAVE Hopkins; Contending Forces; intertextualidad; palimpsesto; plagio; préstamo literario; literatura angloamericana ABSTRACT Pauline E. Hopkins‘s attitude towards fiction as a terrain where political and social truths could be uttered, helped her establish a new hybrid writing paradigm in Contending Forces, her historical romance. The extraordinary intertextual load of references, verbatim borrowings and changed citations, her Emersonian ―noble borrowing,‖ is in fact both an audacious maneuvering of popular literature, and a systematic and subversive redrafting of preceding canonical texts from the Anglo-American literary traditions and of contemporary historical political testimonies. Hopkins‘s palimpsestic aesthetics recreate a sense of African American literary interventions aimed at recomposing a new black archival imaginary redeemed of racist detritus. Hopkins does not emerge in this novel as a plagiarist, as happens in some of her novels, but as an alluder, a narrative voice that always signals readers towards the racial burden of the past hidden in a corpus of intertextual debts to anchor her African American historical romance in a world of textually independent dependence. RESUMEN 1 The research leading to the publication of this essay was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Project FFI2013-44747-P). 14 Carmen Manuel La actitud de Pauline E. Hopkins hacia la ficción como campo para la expresión de verdades políticas y sociales hizo posible que estableciera un nuevo paradigma narrativo en su novela histórica Contending Forces. La extraordinaria cantidad de referencias intertextuales, préstamos literales y citas transformadas, su emersoniano ―tomar prestado con nobleza,‖ es en realidad una maniobra audaz propia de la literatura popular, pero también una reconstrucción sistemática y atrevida de textos canónicos anteriores con el fin de recomponer un nuevo archivo creativo afroamericano libre de detritos racistas. En esta novela, Hopkins no plagia, como así ocurre en otras de sus obras, sino que alude a otros títulos con una voz narrativa que siempre indica a los lectores cuál es la carga racial existente del pasado oculto dentro de un corpus de deudas intertextuales, que sitúan su novela histórica en un mundo de dependencia intertextual independiente. Pauline E. Hopkins‘s Contending Forces (1900) is an empowering picture of the black community that frantically tries to establish links with readers, both black and white, to stand as the definite talking book (Gates 127-169) to bring about social and political changes. In this opus magnus on American racial history, Hopkins establishes a new hybrid-writing paradigm balanced between the two Emersonian ideals on creativity as exposed in his essay ―Quotation and Originality‖ (1859).2 For Emerson, ―there is no pure originality‖ and ―[a]ll minds quote,‖ since ―[o]ur debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant‖ that ―[b]y necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote.‖ In her novel, Hopkins‘s extraordinary intertextual load of references, allusions, verbatim borrowings and changed citations—her ―inspired acts of borrowings‖ (Brown 385)—creates a dialectic process, an Emersonian ―noble borrowing‖—which is related to a ―self-conscious construction of her identity‖ (Pavletich 126), as well as to her ambition to be distinguished as an outstanding race writer in the Era of the Black Woman. What some scholars have labeled as Hopkins‘s ―plagiaristic aesthetic‖ (Sanborn 84) appears in Contending Forces as an audacious maneuvering of popular literature, a systematic and 2 ―Quotation and Originality‖ was firstly read as the second lecture in a course given at Freeman Place Chapel in Boston on March 1859, following Emerson‘s ―The Law of Success‖ and preceeding ―Clubs.‖ Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. 13-66. Pauline E. Hopkins‟s Intertextual Aesthetics in Contending Forces 15 destabilizing redrafting of preceding canonical texts from the Anglo- American literary traditions, and a masked deployment of contemporary historical political testimonies. In Allusion to Poets, Christopher Ricks makes a distinction between plagiarism and allusion, the former being the latter‘s contrary, since ―the alluder hopes the reader will recognize something, the plagiarist that the reader will not‖ (1). For Ricks, ―to allude to a predecessor is both to acknowledge, in piety, a previous achievement and also is a form of benign appropriation‖ (33). In Contending Forces Hopkins constructs her narrative voice as that of an ―alluder,‖ who signals readers towards the racial burden of the past hidden in a corpus of intertextual debts to anchor her African American historical romance in a world of textual independent dependence. Hopkins displays thus a writing practice that attests to her ultimate objective to be cherished as a practitioner of ―another form of collective authorship‖ (Dworkin lxi), or, in Barthean terms, as the African American ―scriptor‖ (Barthes 39). Hence, when viewed through the Genettian lenses of literature in second degree, Hopkins‘s palimpsestic aesthetics recreate a sense of African American literary interventions bent towards the Derridean spectral as well as towards the African American diasporic spectral where the works of the past haunt the present. Insightful scholars have considered Hopkins‘s borrowings in Contending Forces, but they have done so from a partial point of view. 3 In fact, the relationship of intertextual references in Contending Forces cannot be considered adequately without taking into account the close interplay between its borrowings from poetic as well as prose texts, together with biblical and religious quotations, references to the African American culture, allusions to the political, social and cultural world of late nineteenth-century Boston and America, as well as the assumptions that mainstream Victorian American readers projected on quoted or alluded materials. 3 In his article, ―Contending Forces‘ Intellectual History: Emerson, Du Bois, and Washington at the Turn of the Century‖ (2013), Sydney Bufkin considers the influence of Emerson in the novel and relates it to Hopkins‘s unacknowledged references to the racial philosophy of Du Bois. For his part, Daniel Hack (2016) studies the writer‘s use of Tennyson as part of an African American continuum in what he calls ―the African Americanization‖ of Victorian literature. Enlightening, as these articles are, for a better understanding of Hopkins‘s literary borrowings, they fall short of providing a whole composite picture of the writer‘s full encompassing vision in the novel. Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. 13-66. 16 Carmen Manuel As Hopkins explains in her Preface to the novel, her political project of historicizing the black past and present is linked to her struggle to denounce ―the atrocity of the acts committed one hundred years ago‖ (the first four chapters), as they ―are duplicated today, when no slavery is supposed no longer to exist‖ (16). This duplication, that Holly Jackson calls ―historical recursivity‖ (193- 194), focuses principally on the question of late-nineteenth century lynchings and racial violence. This is confirmed by her turning to contemporary history, a fact that is clearly stated when she alerts about her borrowings and informs about the texts she has deployed in chapters XIII and XV: In Chapter XIII I have used for the address of the Hon. Herbert Clapp the statements and accusations made against the Negro by ex-Governor Northen of Georgia, in his memorable address before the Congregational Club at Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass., May 22, 1899.4 In Chapter XV I have made Will Smith‘s argument in 4 Northen is alluded on several other occasions in the text. On page 248, Chapter XIII, the expression ―living death‖ appears which is included in ―words spoken by Prof. H. M. Brown, a Negro and member of the faculty of Hampton Institute.‖ As Mikko Tuhkanen explains, in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fiction written by African American women, the expression ―living death‖ usually refers to concubinage and the consequences that haunted black women‘s lives (359). Yet, Hopkins might be borrowing these words from William J. Northen‘s address before the Congregational Club at Tremont Temple: ―Is there no tender word for the defenseless women of the south who carry with them a living shame in a living death, in a life all too long for its miseries if it lasts but for a day?‖ (Boston Globe 23 May, 1899. Cit. Brown 2007: 184). In Chapter XV, page 267 (author and source unacknowledged), there is another borrowing from Northen: Another man, also a Southerner, has told us: ―In education and industrial progress this race has accomplished more than it could have achieved in centuries in different environment, without the aid of the whites. The Negro has needed the example as well as the aid of the white man. In sections where the colored population is massed and removed from contact with the whites, the Negro has retrograded. Segregate the colored population and you take away the object-lesson.‖ This part was also quoted by Northen, who quotes the source: ―Hon. W. T. Harris, U. S. Commissioner of Education, in a pamphlet published in 1896, ‗Education in the Various States,‘ p. 1331.‖ The complete title of this pamphlet is Education in the various states. Education of the colored race. Slater fund and education of the Negro (United States. Office of Education. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896). Northen mistakes the page number which is in fact 1333. These words are mistakingly referenced by Sydney Bufkin, who writes that they are from ―H.F.
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